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A Disney princess, not winking but floating

BEVERLY HILLS, California — About a third of the way through "Catch Me if You Can," a 2002 film with a turbo-powered Hollywood pedigree — Steven Spielberg as director, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks as stars — a perky, red-haired candy striper named Brenda Strong is introduced, played by an actress, then unknown, named Amy Adams.

Recently Adams revealed that the way she held her own opposite her more famous colleagues was born of a strategy. She focused every grain of her being on banishing thoughts of measuring up and let her role take over. "You could have driven a truck over me," she said, "and had it not killed me, I would have come up as Brenda."

In Disney's "Enchanted," which is to open on Nov. 21, Adams stars as Giselle, first as the tinkly-voiced citizen of the animated land of Andalasia, and then, after she is pushed down a watery portal by the evil Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon), as a three-dimensional woman in modern-day New York. Once this live-action portion of the film takes over, Adams's Giselle wanders through Manhattan until she is taken in by a single dad — a divorce lawyer (Patrick Dempsey) — and his young daughter (Rachel Covey). Before the final credits roll, Adams has sung in a classic, lilting Disneyish vibrato, conversed with forest creatures and made her way along the streets of the city in a full-on fairy-tale princess get-up.

In the summer of 2005, when Kevin Lima, who directed "Enchanted," first met with Adams, he wasn't aware that she was a trained dancer, that she could carry a tune, or that her powers of commitment could withstand her own mental-test example of being run over by an 18-wheeler. He did notice, though, her round, luminous blue eyes, pale complexion and quality of fresh-scrubbed innocence.

"What I was struck by is that she looks like a Disney character," said Lima, who directed the animated feature film "Tarzan" and contributed character animation to "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Little Mermaid."

"Too much wink," is how Lima described other actresses' coy takes on Giselle. Adams, on the other hand, could imitate a hand-drawn Disney heroine's zero-gravity etherealness and dainty gestures and still convey plenty of feeling. "She found ways to keep it in the world of Disney, but give it multiple layers," he said.

Of course if Lima felt Adams wasn't up to the task of grounding Giselle emotionally, he knew he could always weigh her down literally. The white, ruffly, silk and organza Giselle gown that the petite Adams wears through many of her early scenes weighed 45 pounds, was cinched tightly at the waist and had such a life of its own that Lima said Adams began comparing him to the Marquis de Sade.

"I can't tell you how many outtakes there were of me falling backward," said Adams, who found that if she moved too rapidly, she would trip over the floor-length costume's six-foot-wide steel hoop skirt. Still, she managed to tame the dress enough to achieve Giselle's signature walk: It often seems as if she were floating a few inches off the ground. "I decided that she moves side to side," Adams said, "so the dress never got underneath me. It was fun. I love it when something informs the physicality of the character."

Adams, 33, has been around long enough to know that a costume that doubles as an implement of torture isn't the worst thing that can happen in show business. Her first paying jobs in entertainment were supporting roles in Colorado dinner theater musical productions, including "Brigadoon" and "A Chorus Line." Many people hear the words dinner theater and picture roast beef suppers and actors struggling to be heard over the sound of clattering silverware. To Adams, though, it is a dangerous world, teeming with cutthroat saboteurs in leg warmers and dance shoes.

"It was great preparation for Hollywood," she said, over vegetable soup in a Beverly Hills restaurant. "There were only so many jobs. Oooooh, I could tell you stories! Sitting in audition rooms with those catty girls and their little psych-out games? I have worked with some of the meanest people in the world. You can't do anything to intimidate me."

While Adams has the right to her tough-girl self-assessment, it is not the only facet of her personality. First of all, she arrived for lunch by taxi from her Hollywood home because a year ago she bequeathed her car to her younger brother after he wrecked his own. And what about her nervous habit of talking while twirling her hair around her finger like a little girl?

Then there was the anecdote she told about her feature-film debut as a promiscuous contestant in the 1999 beauty pageant satire "Drop Dead Gorgeous," in which Adams ended the phrase "I thought I had a snowball's chance in h — " with a self-censoring gasp. Asked if she considered "hell" an expletive, Adams laughed and shot back, "It is when you're playing a Disney princess."

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Though "Enchanted" is her first starring role in a big-budget studio film, she has been at the center of smaller productions since she was 5. "My father liked to write songs and plays, and we would act them out," said Adams, who grew up in a Mormon household in Castle Rock, Colorado, the middle child of seven. They all participated in the family's homegrown theatricals, but none more enthusiastically than the already-driven Adams. "I didn't always want to rehearse," she said, "but I was the lead, so I was happy."

As a student at Douglas County High School she sang in the school choir and was an apprentice at a local dance company. Even then she knew the financial benefits of a strong work ethic. "If you have a big family, you get a job as soon as you can, if you want anything," said Adams, who after graduation supported her community theater habit by working as a greeter at the Gap. Not surprisingly, she became consumed with selling the part: "I was like, 'Hey, welcome to the Gap! Make sure and check out new colors!' 'Hey, welcome to the Gap! We've got some great sale items in the back.' I mean, it was just all day long. But I've always been the type of person who cannot go halfway on anything."

In 1998, when Adams first moved to Los Angeles, she remembers trying to breathe life into weakly written mean-girl parts, the kind of pay-the-rent schlock that, she said, caused DiCaprio to approach her on the set of "Catch Me if You Can," give her a funny look and announce that he had caught her on cable the night before.

"I was, like, 'Oh, gosh, that statement brings so many embarrassing options to the table that I just don't even know what you're going to say.' And he said, 'You were exhibiting some very un-Brenda-like behavior with the teacher.' And I said, 'Oh, that would be "Cruel Intentions 2,"'" she said, referring to the straight-to-video teenage exploitation film, in which she played a kinky, divisive rich girl.

It took her role in "Catch Me if You Can" to begin a new phase in her career. "Lovely girls," is how she described her more recent parts. "They're tragic, but in a way I can really appreciate. Just so sweet and so accepting."

Two years ago Adams could be found on the outskirts of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, playing a pregnant, perennially upbeat motormouth in the low-budget drama "Junebug." At the time, said Adams's friend and co-star Embeth Davidtz, this interpreter of lovely girls was mired in some unlovely emotions.

"She was very sort of worried about the future, like, 'It's never going to happen for me,' and I was like: 'Don't give up. I just have a feeling that everything is about to change here,'" Davidtz said. In 2006 Adams's "Junebug" performance won accolades from critics, an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress and, for Davidtz, the right to playfully needle Adams as they made the rounds during awards season.

"I'd go, 'Do you believe we're standing here?'" Davidtz said. "And she'd go, 'No.' And I'd go: 'I do. I told you.' It was smug of me, but I just knew it was going to happen."

Yet even Davidtz might have had trouble predicting the range of Adams's current projects, including a role as Tom Hanks's loyal administrative aide in Mike Nichols's forthcoming "Charlie Wilson's War" and that of a naïve nun opposite Meryl Streep's cunning Sister Aloysius in John Patrick Shanley's film adaptation of his stage play "Doubt." The movie she just completed, "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day," is based on Winifred Watson's 1938 novel about a frumpy British governess (Frances McDormand) and an American in London ( Adams).

Suddenly Adams's natural volubility abandoned her. "She means well," was her first try at describing her character, the social butterfly Delysia Lafosse. Then, after a pause, she added, "She's a little self-centered." After a few more false starts she settled on, "A cabaret singer living in London who is trying to figure out her life."